Posted tagged ‘Saudi Arabia’

Saudi Arabian newspaper al-Watan is reporting that Turkish security services have arrested a man of Syrian origins in connection with a plot to assassinate President Barack Obama during his visit to Turkey.

The man, who was carrying an Al-Jazeera TV ID card in the name of M.G., confessed after his arrest that he was planning on stabbing the U.S. president with a knife during the Alliance of Civilizations summit held in Istanbul, adding that he had three other accomplices to help him execute his plan.

According to the paper, Turkish investigators were trying to verify whether the Qatari-based Arab TV channel has truly issued the ID card produced by the man, or if it’s a forged copy.

The suspect, a permanent resident of Istanbul, has been regularly attending all conferences and events relating to the Middle East held in the city.

Al-Watan contacted Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief in Ankara, Yucef al-Sharif, who said that news of the suspect came as a complete surprise to Al-Jazeera staff in Turkey, who all claimed that they knew nothing about the man.

“We learned that he (the suspect) claimed to be working for our bureau … if that has been the case then he most certainly forged our ID card,” al-Sharif told al-Watan in a phone call from Ankara.

According to Senior US officials, the United States military has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere since 2004. It makes you wonder how many attacks that we have not heard about have been carried out.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.